Wood Blewit Toadstool

 I was very happy to find this toadstool in Craiglockart Dell alongside the Water of Leith today. It's a Wood Blewit, quite easy to recognise with it's purple colour (though there are other purple fungi). 

 

 

Some flowers grow in unexpected places

 This year the lesser celandines seem to be more magnificent than ever, I feel as though I'm seeing more of them and in more locations than normal, or is this just because I saw so few last year because of lockdown? 

This must be my favourite patch of lesser celandines, growing in the junction of a tree trunk (I should check what species of tree it is too!) in Craiglockart Dell along the Water of Leith.

Celandines have been growing in this tree (and the one next to it) for years! 

Meanwhile, upstream at the other end of the Dells, wood sorrel is just coming into bloom and this is my favourite patch of that flower, growing on a mossy wall 

When you look over the wall, it's amazing how far down the sorrel is growing (though sadly I couldn't get a good photo to show that).

Autumnal Colour

It's literally raining conkers today, they're pouring down from the horse chestnut trees in Craiglockart Dell. They are really beautiful but I imagine they'd be painful if they hit you on the head, as they're mostly falling from quite a height!

I don't think I've ever before seen so many beautiful conkers. Apparently the young people in groups who have been attending events at the Water of Leith Visitor Centre have been really enjoying the conkers, though I forgot to ask what they were doing with them!

The hornbeam trees are also beautiful at the moment

and this fungus, which I haven't yet identified, but hope to be able to (if you know what it is, feel free to let me know in the comments).

Redwings and Willow Catkins in the Snow

It's been snowing all morning! Crafty Green Boyfriend and I braved the slush and mud along the Water of Leith Walkway up to Saughton Park.

Saughton is an old British word (from the Brythonic I think rather than Gaelic) that means willow and the pussy willows just outside the park were looking beautiful today

We were delighted to see inside the park that a flock of redwings and starlings had taken up residence on the football pitch, flying between the grass and the trees. Crafty Green Boyfriend managed to get these photos of some of the birds

The redwings will soon be returning to Scandanavia to breed. 

The snow has now turned to sleet and we're drinking coffee to warm ourselves up!

Have you seen the tiny red hazel flowers?

You may be familiar with the male catkins of the hazel tree which have been out for a couple of weeks now

but have you ever noticed the tiny red female flowers that are only coming out now? There's one in the photo above, to the left of the catkins.

Moving closer in we can see how pretty these tiny flowers are

And I now finally seem to have worked out how to get the best from the macro setting on my camera! So I should be able to more easily take photos like this in the future.

It almost feels like Summer

The weather is beautiful today! A lovely day for a patrol of Colinton and Craiglockart Dells alongside the Water of Leith.

The wild garlic is blooming now and smells and looks wonderful

The horse chestnut trees are also fully in bloom now and looking beautiful

and the larch flowers continue their slow and steady development towards becoming cones

Later in the morning I saw lots of orange tip butterflies, though none stopped for long enough for me to photograph them.

The Beauty of Frost

It's very cold today but the Dells alongside the Water of Leith look wonderful all covered in frost

frosty rosehip

frosty ivy

30 Days Wild - Volunteer for Nature

As well as 30 Days Wild for the whole of June, this week is Volunteers Week here in the UK. If you have the free time to take part, volunteering is a great way to help nature, enjoy the great outdoors and learn more at the same time!

As many readers of this blog will know, I volunteer each week with the Water of Leith Conservation Trust, helping to look after part of the river. In fact that was what I was doing this morning, in the pouring rain! Just to give an idea of how wet it was, here is the burn that runs into the river at about 8.30 this morning

and here it is at about 10am, with definitely more water running through it.

We've had an exceptionally dry Spring so we need the rain but it has been raining very heavily a lot over the past few days and is set to continue....

One of my main volunteer tasks is to pick litter, I've been provided with a litter picker and I use an old pair of gardening gloves!

I also record the wildlife I see and am contributing to a survey of all the plants and fungi along the river. I've met lots of interesting people (and dogs!) while doing this work and it's a great way to spend time in a lovely woodland and watch it change through the seasons.

I also volunteer with the Woodland Trust as a 'Super Campaigner' (the trust's term, not mine!) which means I use social media to help the trust spread the word about it's campaigns. You may have read some of my blog posts on their campaigns. I recently gave a talk about my volunteering role at the Edinburgh Woodland Trust Volunteer Gathering (which took place at the Water of Leith Visitor Centre) and then lead a guided walk along the river! I was then interviewed for a short video that the trust made for Volunteers Week, you can watch the video here.

If you're interested in volunteering with the Woodland Trust you can find out more here and if you're interested in volunteering with Water of Leith Conservation Trust you can find out more here.

Happy flowers!

Leopardsbane is now out in Colinton Dell alongside the Water of Leith, I always think it looks like a very happy flower

The ramsons (wild garlic) are also well in bloom now 

as indeed are the bluebells, I don't think I've ever seen so many native bluebells in the Dells before!

If you like bluebells you may like my post from Dalkeith Country Park this Saturday!

The Woodland Trust is currently putting together a map of bluebells across the country. They are interested in all bluebells, whether native, Spanish or hybrid. You can take part and add your records to the map here.

Wonderful Wintry Skies

Colinton Dell, this morning

Frosty beauty

It is very cold today, I had to wrap up very warm for my walk round Colinton and Craiglockart Dells as a volunteer for Water of Leith Conservation Trust.

I usually find spiders webs very difficult to photograph but today's frost meant this became a much easier task, here are some of my favourite webs of the day

In the wildflower meadow in Spylaw Park, the flowers are mostly dead now but they have a certain beauty in the frost

Are planted wildflower meadows a good thing or not?

There's a wee bit of a discussion going on on Twitter at the moment about whether City of Edinburgh Council's planted wildflower meadows are a good thing or not.

After my recent dental appointment I had visited the Silverknowes wildflower meadow, which was dancing with white butterflies, it was a lovely sight and passers by were complementing the flowers.

Today I was patrolling the Water of Leith in my weekly conservation voluntary work. At one end of my walk is Spylaw Park, which also has a newly planted wildflower meadow

This meadow was buzzing with bumble bees, honey bees and several species of hoverfly, like this Syrphus species

and this Eristalis species

Then today I walked further than normal right up to Saughton Park where there's three linear wildflower meadows

By this time it had clouded over quite a bit, but there were still quite a few bees and hoverflies enjoying the nectar.

So, the discussion I mentioned at the beginning of the post has revolved around whether it's better to leave areas of grass unmown for most of the year (mowing once a year) or to plant wildflower meadows like those in these photos (which some people argue are unnatural and give people a distorted view of wildflowers).

In some cases the annual mow works beautifully, as you can see in the orchid filled roadside verge on Corstorphine Hill that I blogged about here. That's the ideal, where this minimal management regime allows a rich natural flora to thrive.

On the other hand, not all areas of grassland would be filled with orchids and other delicate flowers if they were allowed to grow naturally. Many would be filled purely with umbellifers and other more obviously weedy species. I've nothing at all against umbellifers, they're beautiful and the insects love them, just look at this myathropa florea hoverfly that I saw in Colinton Dell today (and the hoverflies were chasing each other round this patch of umbellifers!).

The point is though that to get the full variety of native flowers, in this day and age we sometimes need to give nature a helping hand. In some cases that may mean a relaxed mowing regime, in others it may mean planting seeds of rarer or more delicate plants.

And I'm with the hoverflies, both work and work well! So well done to City of Edinburgh Council on providing a variety of habitats for our insects, because they need as much help as they can get!

Plus the planted wildflower meadows draw people's attention and make them think about the beauty and importance of wildflowers.